What Makes a Good Short Story?

What Makes a Good Short Story?

Over the last two years I have done a few short story writing courses supposedly to improve my writing skills, but possibly just as a self indulgence. When you start a course like this it seems that everything you know about writing has to be thrown out and you need to start learning to write again. To do this you use rules presented in books about the process of writing that you are expected to have read, and generally have to buy. Gradually these books form into several camps:
Camp One: believes writing is a form of personal psycho-analysis involving daily, morning journal writing and the expression of your innermost fears and hurts. An adjoining camp to this one believes that writing is sacred, whatever that now means.
Camp Two: believes writing is a technical experience that can be enhanced through the use of modern grammar books.
Camp Three: somewhere in the middle, believe good writing is a process and the writer must revise and revise their work before giving it to an editor to revise all over again.

Short Story Writers

None of these books yet has told me what makes a good short story. However the list of good short story writers is surprisingly short with some names recurring in every camp: Margaret Atwood, Maeve Binchy, Raymond Carver, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, Flannery O’Connor.
Some writers like Isaac Asimov, Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, Saki are just too out- dated to be mentioned.
Australian writers occasionally get a mention – usually David Malouf and Tim Winton. But older Australian short story writers have been forgotten as if the short story is really only appreciated in its own time with nothing but ephemeral messages on offer.

Why do Carver and Chekhov have such high status?

Chekov

Chekhov was a Russian writing from the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth. He was a doctor who saw the life of the peasantry from a detached position rather than one of the nobility. This allowed him to use peasants as characters representing human nature. He also made a dangerous trip to the Sakhalin peninsula where Russia had established a prison system that later mutated into the Gulag system. He interviewed thousands of people there, writing notes on cards which formed the basis of a long report on the Peninsula which is now regarded as a classic.
Chekhov’s stories show a man moving from normal politics at the time to more radical ideas. If he had lived long enough he would have been considered a Menshevik or even a Bolshevik, he might even have become one. As it is, his writing shows readers specific situations without making much, if any authorial comment on them. Rothschild’s Fiddle is not pointedly situated on the Sakhalin Peninsula, but Chekhov assumes his reader will recognize it with a few key words like ‘prison fortress’ and the types of vegetation he describes. Readers of Chekov’s time would have understood the political situation he was presenting and also the religious background which plays against the political circumstances being shown. A modern reader needs background to appreciate what is being said or else the most they get is the religious message of redemption.
In the story Peasants we are swept into a full description of village life that shows how tough life was on everyone, and how little people cared about each other. There is little need for background in this story. But it is disconcerting that the writer is showing no anger at the terrible lives of the people he draws for us. Without being told specifically the reader understands why these peasants will never be able to revolt against the government, but will need leadership such as that given by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Perhaps we should doubt some of Chekov’s interpretations of village life and see him as a possibly unreliable author. This would be heresy, but it is possible that Chekov presents views that were not his own, writing out ideas to see how they play out.
We are reading Chekhov in translation and across a hundred years of political history. We can easily miss his carefully placed clues about location, political situation or religious quandary, and think we understand what he is telling us about human nature. He isn’t easy to read if you have to do research on every story before you can understand it.
If his stories are such classics why don’t people mention the character names when they discuss Chekhov? Perhaps this is all missing the point and it is the ‘show don’t tell’ mantra that is what matters here. Chekhov shows us the situation, then leaves us to work it out. Otherwise he would have been arrested.

Carver

Raymond Carver on the other hand, had no political reason to hide his real locations or plots from his readers, but he is said to have used Chekhov as his model for story writing. Writing in America, in locations we are aware of from film if not from experience, Carver can hide less from his reader. But there are few designated locations in his stories, only general ones – a flat in the city, a house in the suburbs, a town in the country is really as much as you get. Sometimes the characters are named, sometimes they are the narrator, sometimes the narrator is omniscient. There seems to be no Carver formula you can grab and evaluate.
However, when you analyse the language of a Carver story there is a deliberate word choice that excludes all but the emotions Carver wants you to know about. He breaks the rule about not using ‘said’ too many times in order to withhold this important information. The problem is, that if you read a story quickly you can miss the point entirely. An example is the story Cathedral where the information given to the reader in the speech indicators is vital. If you miss the clues you could think the narrator is a male chauvinist pig and miss the real message of the tale! The following are a set of questions I used loosely in a group to fish out the real meaning of Cathedral:

Cathedral Questions

1. 3/ p. 197 from Anyway, this man to ‘this went on for years’ – how many times are the words ‘ told’ or ‘tell’ used? Who is telling what to whom? What does this indicate about the person?

2. P199 “Maybe I could take him bowling” to ‘pieces of the story’ – What words are used for the wife’s speech? What words are used for the writer’s speech? What does the difference in vocabulary indicate about the power in their relationship? How is one person getting all the power?

3. P201 “I feel like we’ve already met’ to ‘I just asked, ‘ I said.
What speech words are used here? How does the wife respond? What words here are the same as p. 199 sequence? What is shown about the relationship?

4. P. 204 ‘For a few moments we sat as if stunned, ‘ to ‘I got up and turned on the TV”
What word here is used for speaking? Who is doing the speaking? How does Robert try to change that? What is the result of his efforts?

5. P. 212 ‘It was then that the blind man cleared his throat’ to the end.
What is different about Robert’s speech to the other characters’ ? How does he deal with the wife? How does he finally get the writer to feel what it’s like to be blind?

Go back to the beginning:
6. Why did the writer really not want Robert to visit?
7. In the first three paragraphs how many times is the word ‘touch’ used? ‘Fingers’? Where do these images recur?
8. Generally – how is abuse shown through the language? Why can Carver break the ‘said’ rule and get away with it?
If you work through the story using the questions you should be able to see Carver using ‘show don’t tell’ in his own idiosyncratic style. It’s not the locations or characters he doesn’t tell you about, it’s the feelings that are missing. In other stories it can take nearly the whole story for the reader to realize what is going on, if you ever really know.

Show, Don’t Tell

So, it’s this process of showing the reader some information without telling them everything they need to know that makes these writers great?
Other writers use this technique, with the same problem of mis-readings it engenders. Roald Dahl wrote a story called ‘The Krait’ in which an Englishman in India thinks a poisonous snake has crawled into his bed. His friend calls a local Indian doctor to get the snake out of the sheets without biting the Englishman. Simple? After listening to this story a number of times I came to the conclusion that the Doctor was playing with the Englishman as a form of revenge for problems the Englishman had caused him. The Doctor chloroforms the snake in the bed, which would surely have chloroformed the Englishman, making him sleep at first, then throw up later. That doesn’t happen. But the chloroforming is done straight faced, and I am no longer able to listen straight faced. None of my students agreed with me, they thought it was a serious story about fear. In fact I quite like the idea we don’t really know if the doctor was taking the mickey out of the man or not, it’s more fun that way. But perhaps it’s not great literature.

Many Ways to Tell a Story

‘Show don’t tell’ is the current Australian favourite method of story telling. It has deficiencies however, and readers in the future may not thank us for withholding information about how our society works. If you open an old collection of stories and read a work like Dust by Gavin Casey, you know where you are, and the description builds up a strong evocation of a disease the working men get as well as the climate in which they work. Without the description this would be a flat story with less emotional impact.
Other writers like A.S. Byatt also use description, right down to the minutiae of teacups, to portray character, while Borgese can swamp us with detail and be impressive. Elizabeth Jolley uses different forms of writing within her texts to show us multiple viewpoints and her stories work well.
There’s more than one way to tell a story. Don’t let fashion dictate what we like.